Occupy Indian Summer

*

While running an errand to Lowe's this afternoon I beheld this crew occupying the northeast corner of Prospect Avenue and Market View Drive in Champaign. The afternoon was crystal clear, warm, and bathed in that special gold sunlight that we get in these latitudes during the first month of autumn. I decided to visit them to get a sense of how my conservative university/corn-cob town may or may not have plugged into the national zeitgeist. Two things surprised me about the event.

First, the group's motliness impressed me as an asset, not a liability. This aggregation of 20 souls was pretty much the same demographic cross-section I'd expect to see at the Target two blocks to the north on any given weekend. The oddest guy in the crowd was the one wearing a "World's Greatest Dad" t-shirt and a home-made comparative US income bar chart drawn on poster board. Several demonstrators appeared to have participated in previous Occupy meetings, but most seemed to be first-timers judging from the chats I had. The crowd had a sort of tentative mood, not knowing exactly what they should be doing other than holding their signs and waving at cars. So they pretty much just did that, and in doing so they gave the clear appearance of unified purpose. It struck me as an organic aggregation, not one of those prefab demonstrations of lame, (usually) liberal political theater where people half-heartedly chant trite, pre-rehearsed rhymes. This group did use the "human microphone" technique to read the 29 September 20111 "Declaration of the Occupation of New York City." Their effort in this also seemed tentative---not self-consciously uptight, but sort of iffy... possibly because there was no one to hear the words except themselves (everyone else was in cars) and the Declaration is damn long to read out loud using such an approach. Nevertheless, all of this added up to an oddly touching experience for me: a not-quite-random meetup of individuals with an impulse to connect, getting to know each other on the spot, voting on whether and where to get together again.

The second, and even more interesting surprise, was how many car horns I heard honking in support while standing at that corner---possibly averaging 6 - 8 a minute at one point. The participants I talked with said it had been pretty much like that for the hour-plus they had been standing there, with only two or three rude remarks having been shouted from passing vehicles. (I heard none while I was visiting the scene.)

Is it possible that there really is some sort of self-organizing grassroots phenomenon in its early stages of nationwide formation? As long as the Occupy movement remains positive, cooperative, nonviolent, non-hierarchical, and noncommercial, maybe it has the potential to address a deep need in a society that is becoming exhausted by its alienation from itself and sick of the depravity that corporations have infected it with.

What Americans think about "big government"

*

Steve Benen, who writes the Political Animal blog for the Washington Monthly, pointed the other day to an opinion polling question that probably doesn't get asked enough in an impartial way---and certainly the results of this question rarely emerge from the black hole of corporate newsrooms. The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll asks this of its respondents:

“I’m going to read you two statements about the role of government, and I’d like to know which one comes closer to your point of view: ‘Government should do more to solve problems and help meet the needs of people’ or ‘government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals.’”

If you click through to Benen's post you'll see the responses provided in this poll as graphed over time (1994 to the present). From the early Clinton years through 2007, the trend lines for both responses are clear, and track in opposite directions as you'd expect. I have no idea what might have happened starting in 2007 to ratfuck the trends, or why the stats today haven't reverted to their 2007 peaks (considering what the crash has done to employment and the safety net), but the basic reality is clear: a majority of Americans want government to do more to solve problems experienced by ordinary people.

I suppose the tangle of trend lines at the end of the record might make fodder for some informed speculation, but I'm just not feeling that well informed this pee em.

In my opinion, though, the significant datum here would seem to be the fact that we never hear a whisper by US corporate media (including NPR) about this curious fact that most Americans want the government to do more to solve the nation's problems.

All of us can have a good laugh about what Jon Stewart confronted Chris Wallace with on Fox News Sunday last weekend (i.e., that the Fox News Network is Lies, Inc.). But the "polite" corporate media are the most important perpetrators of misinformation about public affairs in the US. They do it by ignoring whole swathes of reality. I'll have some more examples in a few days because it's somewhat off-topic here.

(Incidentally, if you look at the Stewart clip at the second link in the previous graf, the apology he offers at the beginning was unnecessary: Politicfact "factfuct" him.)

Telling on himself

*

FireDogLake has a small post about an unwisely candid remark by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell:

When you do something together, the result is that it’s not usable in the election. I think there’s an understanding that if there’s a grand bargain, none of it will be usable in next year’s election.

That's what all these Gang-of-whatevers in the Senate are really about. A small group of members from both parties collude in closed meetings to strike a "grand bargain" on a major issue. These bargains reflect implement the goals of powerful elite interests at the expense of ordinary Americans. On their behalf, elite political commentators lecture us all about how we must swallow our medicine, like big girls and boys. Even when a grand bargain is highly unpopular, voters who want to punish the responsible party have no practical recourse. Politicians know this, and that's why these "gangs" emerge from the mud as predictably as locusts. And most politicians know not to actually admit to this. But not poor Mitch McConnell.

Silly me

*

My firm prediction that the government would be shut down for between 5 and 7 days, not published here but explicitly stated to friends, was based on my certainty that Republicans needed a face-saving play to keep the tea bag caucus on board with Boehner. My guess was that this would come in the form of a short-term shutdown to satisfy the 'baggers, followed by an appeal to higher authority, such as reopening the government to restore "market confidence." Then we'd get a GOP declaration of victory, and their own well founded faith in having the history rewritten by party propagandists and broadcast on Fox.

Well, I believe I got the "face-saving" aspect correct. But I truly did not predict that it would be Harry Reid and Obama who would give Boehner his political cover, and also several extra billion in cuts to sweeten the deal. Silly me.

Literally speaking

*

I think this FireDogLake blogger takes John Boehner's "machine gun" imagery too seriously, as if this pickled Ohio sad sack was crafting some cunning subliminal message to god-knows-who about who-knows-what. I think a more straightforward interpretation of Bohener's remark is that people of his ilk are every bit as delusional as Colonel Qaddafi. One is left to wonder why the Times and the Post and NPR and [~] use Quaddafi as the gold standard for insanity and megalomania when we have so many competitors right here in the good old USA.

I'll acknowledge that the previous sentence was a mere rhetorical device: no one really is "left wondering" about that for very long.

Vandalizing the capital building?

*

As seen on Eschaton, an AFL-CIO blog accuses "Governor Scott Walker" of welding capital windows shut to prevent outsiders from passing food through to protesters who have been occupying the building since Sunday.

True? Who knows? I haven't heard a peep about this elsewhere. But if it is, this tactic would seem to violate any reasonable state life-safety standards and possibly cross over into the realm of criminal damage to property. Unless state governors are allowed to do whatever the fuck they want when their "subjects" assemble to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Yesterday, Paul Krugman noted the eerie silence of mainstream (i.e., corporate) news shops about the historic political demonstrations in Madison---crowd sizes unprecedented since the Vietnam era. Getting to smell a lot like Red China around here these days.

Today's doke

*

Haha!

But our Republican stalwart might not even have wanted that government job, anyway. I'd think he would have felt morally compromised by having those taxpayer-funded healthcare and paid holiday benefits forced upon him against his will. Farewell, asshole.*

Furthermore, a thought experiment: Imagine how much faster Rachel Maddow or Bill Maher would have been gone than this guy if they'd even thought of wisecracking about labor protesters expressing their Second Amendment rights at Madison.

* Even worse for Mr. Former Indiana Deputy Attorney General Jeff Cox: he was not a political appointee, as I'd assumed---he was in "career status," meaning that he might have some difficulty being rehired in the public sector. And I'd think that even conservative firms would probably want to keep hands off his resume, just to demonstrate "civility."

Separated at birth?

*

Here's a riddle for you on a lazy late-winter night:

Q: What do former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum and fading Libyan Strongman Moammar Gadhafi have in common?

A: They both accuse their homegrown protestors of being on drugs.

PS: "Santorum." Hehheh heh. Heh heh....

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

*

A reader (I think I know who he is) planted a link to this Phil Ochs performance in the comments section of last evening's post. I feel that the lyrics of this song are much more timely now than they were in the late '60s.



I was never a big fan of folk-type singers as a youth being as my predilection was for big powerful urban sounds, so people like Dylan, Neil Young, and others flew under my radar. But whenever someone refers me to a Phil Ochs lyric I come away ever-more impressed with his mind and somewhat disappointed that I was never able to connect with him at the same time a few of my high school pals did.

This song, unlike so many of the era, is not about "recreational" revolution or a vehicle for radical chic, but (to my ears, at least) a very impressionistic thought experiment of what it might be like in this country when a majority of disenfranchised people come to one clear mind about who is the real enemy of America: the parasite class and its vassals. The galactic levels of wealth accreted to these winner-take-alls is setting the stage not for another glorious 1,000-year reich, but for the onset of decadence along every axis of human endeavor. Their heirs will not inherit their drive for earning, investing, and stealing because they will already have plenty of free money in the vault. The parasite class cannot possibly keep a lid on their laissez-faire paradise if they don't even possess the skills to change a flat tire on the BMW. The tipping point---which nobody should believe will lead directly to a New Morning In America---will be defined by the congealing of a common awareness. This will be embodied in the emergence of a new story line about what has really been going on here since the 1970s; a plot that is Occam-simple and explains pretty much everything that has happened, from the repudiation of the social contract to the dissolution of American civic comity to the end of our illusion that anyone can be "middle class" if they work hard and play by Ronald Reagan's rules.

I don't necessarily believe that the parasite class will literally come to the end envisaged here by the lyrics of Phil Ochs (read them on the YouTube page where this video comes from), but I am certain that the metaphorical content is prophetic. Hopefully in my lifetime, but if not, then certainly by the time my offspring are writing blogs in order to forestall Sudoku and crossword puzzle hell. Not that I'm a big fan of flames and violence and the like, but rebirth and renaissance are welcome concepts.

The Ringing of Revolution, Phil Ochs (1966, from "Phil Ochs in Concert," Elektra Records [catalog number not available]), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Aside to AnarchistOpposition: if you are who I think you are, then I owe you a treat from the Lummox Rock files as soon as I can come up with a worthy surprise.

The Cheesehead Revolution

*

From completely off my radar I'm now reading about a state governor who has ordered the state police to round up members of the Wisconsin legislature. TPM reports:

...the state's Democratic senators have left the state entirely, putting them out of the reach of the state police who have been ordered to round them up so that Republicans have a quorum and can take up Gov. Walker's union-busting budget bill.

There's a whole separate discussion we might have about the state's power to legislatively "bust" labor unions. But the thing to think about is this: since when in the United States can the executive branch of any state "round up" members of the legislature and make them participate in a session? That is how a junta works, not a democracy.

Can the governor also order the state police to round up members of the opposition party for any other reason? What is the legal theory that justifies an apparent violation of the separation of powers in any state of this union? Does the 10th Amendment permit states to establish forms of governance that are forbidden by the U.S. Constitution? What specific law are the Wisconsin legislators violating here?

An interesting aspect of this executive coup against workers' rights in Wisconsin, again according to TPM, is that

...Scott Fitzgerald, who is ordering the state police to track down the wayward Democratic senators is the son of the head of the state police, Steve Fitzgerald, who in turn was appointed to the top spot by Walker. Steve Fitzgerald is also the father of the state's speaker of the House, Jeff Fitzgerald.

The denial of a quorum by a minority group of members is a legitimate parliamentary maneuver. It's no more obstructionist than what happens in the U.S. Senate when the minority party filibusters bills that clearly have support of the majority. It's no more obstructionist than Ronald Reagan's famous "veto pen," which he smugly wagged into the Kliegl lights the many times he shot down laws passed by both chambers of Congress in the 1980s. So the issue shouldn't be whether obstructionist tactics are legal, because they are, and Republicans are much more adept at using them than Democrats.

The issue is this: is an obstructionist parliamentary maneuver by members of a state legislature illegal in the State of Wisconsin? How about in other states?

This is going to be really interesting. Wisconsin was an incubator of American progressive politics in the first half of the 20th century, and the tradition persists. Nobody knows how this will play out in terms of union busting, but it should give a significant stimulus to the concept of union solidarity in the Cheesehead state.

And in my opinion there is not a single working man or woman in this nation who has any smidgen of "enlightened self interest" in rooting for "Governor Scott Fitzgerald." "Governor Scott Walker" (duh).

A Petraeus scenario for 2011

*

Longtime readers should remember my cheeky piece of 2007 political speculation which put General Dave Petraeus at the center of several presidential campaign scenarios. I evolved it to account for certain unfolding actions, but I still think any of them was sound enough to have been worthy of exploratory development by wealthy GOP "thought leaders." In all of its forms, my Petraeus speculation was based on certain non-farfetched assumptions. Not to belabor them at this time, here is the gist:

1. To win back the White House, Republicans need to stick with the strategy of nominating someone who hasn't left a long trail through Washington or the public media, because quite apart from their professed ideologies, the field of "possibles" is littered with the unappealing and the unsavory. The reason that GOP officials or their pundits can launch trial balloons for people like Barbour, Bloomberg, and Huckabee is because launching them for the likes of Boehner, Christie, and Jindahl is, prima facie, preposterous.

2. The establishment's favorite political narrative is that our nation needs "bipartisan" solutions as put forth by "respectable moderates." It is desperate to find us candidates that can "rise above partisan bickering" to continue cramming the Reagan/Bush agenda down our throats.

The GOP is so bereft of candidates who are attractive on even a casual personal level that I was convinced then (and still am now) that their only hope to win the 2012 presidential election without stealing it is to appoint a "standard-bearer" who is cut from a completely different mold in terms of superficial appeal. I believe the Republicans will quickly discover that the time is ripe for General Petraeus to step forward. First, a general has "gravitas" with the American people and, as usual, US political culture makes people stop and think real hard before criticizing a soldier. Second, I believe that Republican power brokers and rank-and-file voters consider him telegenic, and potentially even "sexy." (I may have more to say on that later assuming I don't get skeeved out thinking about it.) And third, many people perceive military general officers as dutiful public servants who are not distracted by ego and ambition, so Petraeus would be helped to whatever extent Americans are looking for a Man On Horseback to "deliver" us from our troubles.

All of that is arguable, of course; I'm just saying that for a number of superficial and calculating reasons, Petraeus would be comparatively easy to sell to the "middle wing" of our body politic. I'll tackle this topic, hopefully, in small pieces as time passes instead of continually trying to formulate "unified field theories" like I did during 2007-08.

I'm dusting off this scenario, though, because certain people in the GOP seem to be thinking along approximately the same lines. For one thing, there is a group that thinks Petraeus is entitled to some rank inflation to put him on a par---militarily and in terms of visibility---with history's handful of five-star generals such as Dwight Eisenhower. And for another thing, this right-wing "Vets for Freedom" group is already trying to push Petraeus into the limelight in preparation for a presidency bid.

Last Giffords post, I hope

*

Before I leave the political aspects of the Giffords massacre behind in preparation for several days of phony debate and false equivalency to pollute mass media channels, I'll reprint below a comment on my post entitled "And Dove bars shall issue from the assholes of the righteous," contributed by that frequent and prolific Fifty50 visitor, "Anonymous." It evidently didn't make it to the comments section because Blogger thought it was too long or something, but it came through via email notification. Without further comment (except in the comments section):

yes, let bygones be bygones. Sage advice.

I put Fox news on (something always done with utmost caution) yesterday to see how they were reporting what MSNBC and CNN were doing their 24 hour work on. Hey, on Fox we could learn about smokeless cigarettes--a news infomercial since nothing else was happening in the country.

The right was momentarily caught unprepared to spin this stuff but guys like that "Fineman" give them a break to recover and crank up their propaganda.

The 74 yr old sheriff of Pima County AZ did the country a big service yesterday by stating very clearly what the hell is happening in AZ and in the US. Let Fox spin that. But many other issues are and should come up because of this, especially once the identity and circumstances of the other victims are made public.

Such as health care: the medical help the victims require as well as the mental health help guys like the shooter never get anymore (doesn't take a psychiatric degree to read that youtube shit and diagnose a schizophrenic).

Such as gun control: why the hell is a guy like that carrying around a police/ military style weapon? Why does he have access to it any more than he does to plastic explosives? And so much for the idiotic NRA rationale that in states like AZ with open carrying gunslingers the bad guys won't stand a chance. That could have been an NRA convention and, with that weapon, he could have hit 19 people just that quickly before anyone could react.

Such as the role of government: I didn't notice any private business dealing with that mess. Like evacuating the scene, like getting the injured to medical facilities, like the state university med school they were moved to itself. The public law enforcement entities handling the crime scene and investigation (city, county, state and federal--all taxpayer supported). No, the only role I noticed for the private sector in all this shit was the strip mall stage on which it took place. There is a very good reason for the taxes a society pays-- many of them demonstrated in this tragedy.

So lets sit back, take the "fineman's" advice, give our Randian and Paulian-worshipping brothers and sisters the benefit of the doubt, and hear what they have to say. Already the Alaskan snowbilly has pointed out that the "surveyor's" sights on her website were misinterpreted. Reload babe!

Way to keep the eye on the ball

*

Among President North Star's highest priorities for the new year? Using the Justice Department to intimidate WikiLeaks sympathizers not accused of any crime. Unconscionable and futile---a waste of resources and good will.

I intend to write a bit about the new era of whistleblowing the world entered last year, but there are reasons why I must select my words carefully. It's probably legal for me to say that I think this has been the most fascinating and asymmetric application of political expression I've ever been aware of. Kind of like that guy in Tienanmen Square standing in front of a column of tanks in 1989, except packing a coupla Romulan disruptors and a Jem H'Dar cloaking device.

As nearsighted, misguided security apparatchiks busily labor to make a martyr of Julian Assange, they may discover that he has something in common with the mythical hydra. Some people may still think the President really can play 10-dimensional chess, I'm pretty sure he's no Hercules. Even if he were, why not labor to decapitate the criminal Wall Street hydra, for example? (Oh wait, I already know why: because we must not hold banking racketeers accountable for their crimes, but we must instead "reach out" to them and give them high-level policy positions in our administration.)

Editor's note: my intent for the new year is to write less about topical issues like this, because it feels pointless. RubberCrutch has bigger fish to fry.

Without a poke [updated]

*

This pig is only slightly more likely than I am to be the 2012 GOP presidential nominee. Why the bad outlook? Because he says things out loud that the mainline Republican power elites only think silently to themselves or discuss in secure undisclosed whites-only men's social clubs. Alpha-Republicans and their shadow government of right-wing publishers, think tanks, and foundations may mostly be crypto-segregationists, but they know enough to hide their true philosophies and objectives from the light of day because even in this coarse age, polite society is still repulsed by intentional expressions of unvarnished bigotry. Buffoons like Barbour draw unwanted attention to the hidden agenda with their dewy reminiscences about how swell segregationists actually were---nice, neighborly sorts of fellows, actually (because it really felt like that to them, probably). Still, they get treated with lace gloves as if they "misremember" or are "confused." Bah!

The corporate news media will seemingly float a trial presidential balloon for any Republican who hasn't been photographed having sex with a 15-year-old outside Utah.

Update: in order to help explain the bitter tone of the text above I had meant to include this link to Atrios, who today excerpted a 1956 article by the legendary David Halberstam on "white citizen councils." Chilling shit.

Eluding me: the obvious

*

Eluding me where? Hiding in plain sight, as usual. What has eluded me? Democrat "succession planning" if President Obama were in fact experiencing the sort of collapse that a decent but naive man might suffer if he were psychologically unsuited to wield brutal, overwhelming power in the manner a U.S. President must deploy it.

If the President were in fact melting down, and if he did indeed want out, then we can assume that top Democrat leadership is well aware of it. Assuming that said leadership is not directly involved in a conspiracy to hand over the nation's full executive, legislative, and judicial authority to the Republican Party, then they will probably want to hang onto the White House into 2012.

Article 2, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution specifies that "In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the same shall devolve on the Vice President...." This portion of Article 2 has been modified and extended by the 20th and 25th Amendments, but the fundamental succession remains the same as it was in 1790.

If the President resigned owing to his inability to execute his duties, it would be unprecedented. But this has been a decade of unprecedented developments in our humble democratic republic. I'm sure you can think of as many as I could list here. Putting aside the personal humiliation that might go with a historic abdication, I can easily believe that an introspective, spiritual family man would at some point readily submit to this humiliation in return for the opportunity to salvage his soul and his life.

Were that to occur, the successor would be a veteran Democrat insider who may even be capable of rising to the occasion. And his successor to the vice presidency? That would depend on his own ambitions. But it could be either of two alpha females: Hillary, if Biden wants to retire or revert to the vice presidency; Pelosi, if he wishes to try on the office for a full 4 years. And in case it isn't obvious, all of this speculation falls into the category of thinking outside of the conventional wisdom; it amounts to guessing, not prediction. And I should also be clear that none of this speculation represents wishful thinking on my part.

For your "empty messaging" collection

*

Yes, for sure! Progressive Democrats are certain to resonate to this kind of twaddle while the Obama White House is simultaneously busy with futile but chilling expressions of authority that will seem inexplicable and evil to any person who has grown up with open access to the internet. You know what kind of people those are: Obama's base.

I believe it's inevitable that President Obama will have a stiff primary challenge in 2012 from the progressive wing of his party, and that it will be strongly supported by the progressive wing of society at large.

Another Obama problem

*

Independently of my speculations about the President's problems in my previous post, I think that a real on-the-ground problem he needs to solve immediately is the lack of a formidable chief of staff. Whatever reasons one may have to mock and despise Rahm Emanuel, by all accounts I've read he was well suited to the rigors of controlling access to the President and, for whatever fool reason, could inspire dread in a certain number of people. (Probably including Obama, regrettably.)

Interim Chief of Staff Pete Rouse, according to his Wikipedia writeup, has paper qualifications for the job. But he looks like kind of a pud to me, so therefore that must mean he's a lightweight (a portly one, nevertheless).

Perfect candidate for permanent Chief of Staff? Hillary Clinton's peckerwood husband. Perfect, that is, if you enjoy the Clinton brand of Davos democracy. Which I don't. But you must acknowledge that it would be an ace move on Obama's part that would drive Republicans berserk. Therefore, I say "make it so!" After all, we can't expect anything progressive from national Democrats now, at least not until Madame Speaker throws her granny shawl into the ring about a year from now.

Of course, it occurs to me that if Obama really did hire Hillary Clinton's peckerwood husband as Chief of Staff, it might ensure that Obama self-deposes about a year from January to clear the deck for Hillary and head Pelosi off at The Castro.

The "why" of Obama's problem [updated]

*

Here's my contribution to the grand parlor game of Winter 2010, namely trying to figure out what's the matter with President Obama.

The "what" of the problem was evident pretty much from the start. He has kept his counsel with establishment Democrats and Blue Dogs while dismissing the priorities of the people who voted him into office. He has been preoccupied with "reaching across the aisle," pulling it back each time with another missing wristwatch or gold ring, for the futile pursuit of meaningful bipartisanship with adversaries who are intent on destroying his presidency. He fails to provide vocal, energetic leadership to achieve his purported goals, and fails to use his rhetorical skills to talk over the heads of bitter political enemies straight to "the American people." And finally, he concedes negotiation points to the predators and parasites in advance of the negotiating, which lets them know that they can make him cave on any issue. For a long time, cautious optimists felt that all these tactics were part of some super ninja political strategy that would, without warning, explode forth and overwhelm his regressive opponents. Myself, I discarded the idea that he was a 10-dimensional chessmaster upon his continual dereliction of duty during healthcare reform negotiations.

The "why" of it is a puzzle. Paul Krugman has an idea about it---an extension of observations he has been making for at least a year. The gist of it is that now everyone is seeing what Obama is made of: nothing. Could be. It's possible that Obama was never anything more than a legislator-poet; a guy with a great broadcast voice (when he's not stammering all over himself) and enough charisma to be able to make any of his ideas seem perfectly reasonable to a wide spectrum of people.

A competing idea, just as prosaic as Krugman's but with more of the ring of truth to me, is that while Obama really does possess the attributes of leadership, intelligence, ideals, and virtue that so many of his partisans clearly perceived during the election cycle, he is psychologically and unemotionally unsuited to the level of power he stepped up to. Only four years after logrolling small-time downstate legislators as an Illinois state senator, and having served barely enough time in the U.S. Senate to be oriented into its ways, voters granted Barack Obama his own DEFCON4-grade mansion, airborne command fortresses, bulletproof limousines, personal praetorian guard, and enough power to annihilate all but a dozen nations on earth with relative impunity.

Obama, the dedicated family man---kind, laid-back, hip, spiritual---must try to sleep every night under the inevitable weight of ordering or consenting in assassinations worldwide, the launch of predator drone attacks that kill innocent people, and "renditions" around the globe (I think we can assume that these have not stopped). Immediately upon his election, masses of ignorant, resentful people were whipped into a lather of hate for this well-meaning man, who epitomizes the so-called American Dream, by gleeful corporate news conglomerates, vicious national politicians, and demonic infotainers. He surrounded himself with bad (as in Evil) people in key positions, thinking it to be politically savvy because establishment Democrats told him it was "reality"), and has been cuckolded continually by their bad faith and world-destroying policy recommendations. Certainly he is now aware that he no longer has a significant political constituency---only a relative handful of people who think he's better than McCain would have been.

My current thinking, regretfully, is that Obama's talents and ambition got him to the Oval Office, but he had no idea what arriving at that destination would do to him mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. It would be a miracle if he is not demoralized, despondent, isolated, afraid, and fed up. A sign of such a miracle would be if the President were behaving defiantly, deconstructing the malevolent intent of his political adversaries and proactively selling his own positions directly to the American people.

The increasing pace of Obama's political gaffes suggests to me that he's now doing it on purpose. It is possible that he is desperately hoping for a serious, qualified primary challenger. If one emerges and can poll at around 35 percent among likely Democratic voters, I'd have every expectation that he would be greatly tempted announce his intention not to seek reelection on similar grounds that LBJ pleaded after he was almost beat in the 1968 New Hampshire primary by Gene McCarthy.

A hypothetical primary challenger in 2011, like McCarthy in 1967, would most likely be a deeply dedicated progressive who is skilled at retail-level politics and at home in the corridors of power; somebody who has been in The Game for awhile. (No Blue Dog or Clintonista would even have a legitimate pretext for challenging Obama since he has been their cat's paw for 2 years now.) My guess at this point? Madame Speaker, Nancy Pelosi.

[Editor's note: I updated this post on Saturday morning to present a more nuanced viewpoint in the last several paragraphs than I was capable of accomplishing on Friday night.]

Progressives *still* didn't win the midterms, but...

*

...two more Blue Dogs look like they're being targeted by the Shit-Hammer of Destiny.

Blue Dogs, as others of you may agree, are a breed of spineless Democrat (there are other breeds, too) that thrives as a parasite on the body of the progressive political tradition. They subsist by devouring Blue Dollars, which they rapidly metabolize into Red Dollars. Blue Dogs excrete Red Legislative Compromises that empower a minority of regressive political bosses to turn our democratic republic into a feudal domain.

No, progressives didn't "win" Tuesday

*

But....

Big Hussein Otis pointed me to a plucky column by Karen Dolan, an activist and fellow at the liberal Institute for Policy Studies, which merrily proclaims that progressives "won" yesterday's national midterm elections. That's a farfetched interpretation, obviously, and she certainly must be using it to attract the attention of dispirited liberals. But the analysis in back of if conforms to one of my own conclusions.

I am part of Dolan's target audience even though I'm not a Democrat and never will be. Since high school I've identified with the ideals of the political heroes of the progressive era in U.S. politics: Teddy Roosevelt, "Fighting Bob" LaFollette of Wisconsin, and the muckraker journalists, for example. Democrats are supposed to be the heirs to and stewards of the American progressive political tradition. But Democrats became lukewarm toward, and even ashamed of, their responsibility to promote progressive policies and programs. I assume this abdication of responsibility---cowardice, let's say---is the result of being vilified for liberalism during 30 years of rhetorical assault by a minority of loud, hateful political and corporate thugs. Well, too bad---"politics ain't beanbag. Abandoning the practice of your core principles while publicly implying that you still fight for them on behalf of ordinary Americans an ugly failure of character. That should have consequences. In the Tuesday midterms, it did. And my conclusion is: good!

Over half the members of the House Blue Dog caucus lost their seats to Republicans, by Dolan's count. And, says Dolan, almost two thirds of the conservative House Democrats who voted against HCR---Blue Dogs and others---also lost. Meanwhile, only three members of the House progressive caucus lost. So, as I say: good!

"Blue Dogs", as you know, are a caucus of congressional Democrats who use the party label, its past reputation, and its resources to win their elections so they can use their office to undermine their own party and thwart progressive legislation in concert with the regressive political minority. In other words, Blue Dogs are a critical component of the American regressive movement, and turn that minority into a majority. They do their dirty work in Democrat drag, pretending that they're "centrists," and party leadership permits this situation to continue. The party has gotten what it deserves.

So even though progressives would be silly to consider Tuesday's results to be a win, some bad karma accounts were settled. Will the party learn its lesson? I don't think so. I think it's more likely the party will die from it. So that will leave room for a new progressive party to push its way into the game. If we still have a functioning democracy by then.

And meanwhile, the new Republican coalition is flimsier than a Walmart card table. How can Rand Paul preach to his Libertarian congregation that Government doesn't create jobs when it's just created one for him and each member of his new staff?